In his campaign pitch for the two petition candidates currently seeking election to the Board of Trustees, Joseph Asch '79 bemoans the alleged decline of a once-great institution and rails against an establishment supposedly covering itself in "self-congratulatory fluff." He even quotes me (against the "fluff") -- or gives the impression that he is doing so ("Dear Old Dartmouth?," Feb. 28). The piece is disingenuous and riddled with unsubstantiated assertions, misleading statements and oversimplifications.
Far from being mired in "self-congratulatory fluff," the College I know -- I have taught in the department of government here for twenty years -- is acutely aware of the multiple and complex challenges it faces in a changing world. Our mission has not changed, but other things have.
My department offers students a wider array of courses now than it did when Asch was a student, and its professional visibility has been enhanced in recent years by aggressive, imaginative and successful lateral hiring -- made possible in part by the generosity of alumni donors.
Senior hiring is always difficult; even junior hiring is increasingly complicated, in part for reasons that people watching children in two-career couples can well imagine. Sometimes the pieces do not fall into place; sometimes we are the ones who get poached. On this question as on others, Asch latches on to an exceptional case and portrays it as the rule. Chairs (of whom I am one) are not being told there is "no money" for world-class hires any more than students are lining up to buy their way into closed courses.
Several of the courses in my department are oversubscribed; many other courses are actually enrolled below their caps. We are working with the Registrar to improve the queuing system; we are also revising our major requirements and improving our system of advising so that students will be better positioned to put together intellectually coherent programs. We would like to see our course count increased; we expect to have to make an argument, we respect the needs of others, and we recognize the complexities involved.
Given Asch's prose, I am not sure whether or not I am the professor who called the writing skills of today's students "appalling," but it does sound like something I would say, especially at the end of a long day. I would add that the foreign language skills of today's matriculating students are even more appalling, and that the two problems are linked.
These phenomena are not the product of "Dartmouth's drift" or of Jim Wright's allegedly nefarious leadership. They are the result of profound societal change, driven in part by technological change, which has in turn deeply affected K-12 education. Institutions across the country have been struggling for years to devise solutions that work pedagogically and that are financially feasible.
In his column, Asch declines to inform readers that he had a horse in this race: the Departmental Editor Program, which places a writing editor (all former high school English teachers) at the disposal of students in three departments (art history, math and religion). Asch funded this pilot program and lobbied energetically on its behalf.
The subcommittee on writing (on which I sit), cognizant of the roots and depth of the challenge we confront, is inclined not simply to expand and strengthen the English 2-3-5 and first-year seminar programs, but to emphasize writing across the curriculum and in the disciplines. Professor Thomas Cormen, to whom Asch makes disparaging reference, has taken responsibility for the writing program, and has already introduced an evaluation system to provide improved feedback to both instructors and administrators as the Program -- already the largest at the College -- develops.
Elsewhere on campus, other faculty groups are proposing ways to deepen our students' access to the global environment in which they will live and in which we hope they will be leaders. Committees are tedious and time-consuming. They are also a tested mechanism that reasonable men and women adopt to pool knowledge, vet innovative solutions, and build coalitions.
Asch received his B.A. in 1979; I received mine three years earlier. The world has changed dramatically since he and I were in college, and the changes have affected all of us in intimate and unavoidable ways. Human beings find change difficult. Most civilizations have had well-developed concepts (and narratives) of decline; in contrast, the idea of progress is in large part an Enlightenment invention, and even where it took hold, it remains contested.
There is something deeply human and perennially resonant about the sense of loss that Matthew Arnold expressed and about the fear of decline that he articulated as change re-shaped Victorian England; were it otherwise, we would not continue to treat "Dover Beach" and "Culture and Anarchy" as classics.
A liberal education -- our common enterprise at Dartmouth -- equips individuals to understand and analyze experience (including their own) from multiple perspectives. There is a difference between critical purchase and venting. The former is central to what we do at Dartmouth; the latter is a hallmark of the type of politics exemplified by Asch's letter and embraced by the candidates he endorses.
The rhetoric of nostalgia, decline and what the historian Fritz Stern calls "cultural despair" has propelled angry populist movements in political arenas both large and small. These movements are indeed, as Asch approvingly suggests, "imbued with the rebel spirit," and like Asch, they lash out with little regard for facts, consistency, or causation. Whether they emerge on the right or the left; they are simultaneously anti-establishment ("Throw the rascals out") and authoritarian. At whatever level of social life it is played, this is an old movie. At best, the movie ends very quickly; at worst, it ends very badly. It is not a movie we should want playing at a theater near us.
